Have We Forgotten How to Read the Bible?
How We Lost the Biblical Story — and why recovering it changes everything.
Uncertain Beginnings
When I was twelve years old, right after becoming a Christian, I did what most new Christians do — I started reading the Bible. And, like most new Christians, I started at the beginning in the Book of Genesis. There, I was quickly confronted with a rather perplexing passage, especially for a twelve-year-old boy.
“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”
Nephilim.
I had no idea what it even meant other than what the passage says. I remember feeling like I was reading about a long-lost mythic past rather than a sacred religious text. So once again, like most new Christians, I went and asked my pastor about these Nephilim.
Just like I remember the wonder and mystery that stirred in me when I first read that enigmatic passage, I also remember my pastor’s response with unusual clarity. There was a brief pause, a slight shift in posture, and then a redirect: “That’s an interesting question. Let me read what some commentaries have to say about Genesis 6 and I’ll get back to you.”
Unfortunately, he never did. I’m not pointing fingers — it simply never came back up. The question was swept under the rug, as so many questions like it are. I noticed my pastor would mention scholars and theologians like Calvin, Spurgeon, Augustine, the Puritans, and others. I thought, maybe, one of them had the answer.
Finding the Disconnect
So, I read Calvin and Spurgeon.
Yes. At twelve years old I was breaking into Spurgeon’s sermons and by 15 I had read the entirety of Calvin’s Institutes. I read The Confessions of Augustine, Grudem’s Systematic Theology.
But alas, they didn’t really answer the question — at least not in the way I needed. What I got instead was a framework for why the question probably didn’t matter as much as I thought it did, and a gentle suggestion to focus on the doctrinal essentials.
I was trying to be a faithful, sincere, Bible-reading Christian. And I spent years accumulating these redirects instead of answers — pointed perpetually toward systems, frameworks, and other theologians rather than toward the text and the story the text was trying to tell me.
The moment that finally cracked it open for me is a longer story — one I told in my very first post.
The road that led to that moment started much earlier, with questions nobody seemed willing to sit with. And somewhere in the years between those early redirects and that later epiphany, I began to suspect that the problem wasn’t the questions nor the systems and frameworks of theology.
The problem was we’d forgotten how to read the Bible.
The Great Disconnect
Here is a question worth sitting with honestly:
How is it possible that millions of Christians spend decades reading the Bible and still feel like they’re reading sixty-six separate books?
We know David and Goliath. The story of Noah, Daniel in the lions’ den, Paul on the road to Damascus, and John on the island of Patmos are all familiar. The Christmas story and the Easter story and the stories in between. We have heard them preached, taught, illustrated, and dramatized. These stories have been flannel-boarded and we have vacation-Bible-schooled them and memorized their key verses.
We know stories.
But most of us — if we’re honest — do not know the story.
Ask the average church-attending Christian what the Bible is fundamentally about and you will get a range of answers: salvation, redemption, God’s love, how to live, the life of Jesus, the history of Israel. All of those answers contain truth. None of them are wrong exactly.
But none of them name the story.
The Golden Thread
The Bible is not primarily a collection of moral lessons. It is not a systematic theology waiting to be organized. Nor is it a self-help manual, a history textbook, or a devotional anthology. No, it is a narrative — a single, unified, cosmically-scaled story with a beginning, a conflict, a hero, a resolution, and a cast of characters that extends far beyond humanity. There are villains and battles. At the center is a throne, a war raging at its edges, and a promise running like a golden thread from the third chapter of Genesis to the last page of Revelation.
Yet somewhere along the way, most of us were taught to mine that story for useful pieces rather than inhabit it as a whole.
We became experts at extracting truths from Scripture while simultaneously becoming strangers to the world Scripture was trying to build.
That is the great disconnect. And it has consequences far more serious than most of us realize.
The Water We Swim In
Before we name the problem clearly, we have to understand where it came from. The disconnect didn’t appear out of nowhere — and it isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault in particular. Rather, it is the downstream consequence of a cultural current most of us never chose to swim in.
The intellectual revolution we call the Enlightenment — roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe — fundamentally reorganized the way educated people related to knowledge. The watchwords were reason, analysis, and systematic organization. To understand something meant to dissect it, categorize it, and reassemble it into a rational framework. Mystery was a problem to be solved. Complexity was a puzzle to be ordered. Everything from literature, history, nature, philosophy, and everything in between could be properly understood by breaking it into its component parts and analyzing each one.
This was not an entirely wrong instinct. It produced genuine advances in science, medicine, and human understanding. But it was also a profoundly reductive instinct when applied to things that were never meant to be dissected — things like story, like poetry, like the kind of meaning that only emerges when you hold a narrative whole rather than breaking it into propositions.
We became skilled surgeons and poor storytellers. Then we brought that surgical instinct to Scripture.
The result
The result was not heresy — at least not usually. It was something subtler and, in some ways, more pervasive. In general, the church knew how to locate proof texts but had lost the ability to follow the grand narrative arc. A people who could argue doctrine with impressive precision but couldn’t tell you what act of the cosmic drama they were currently living in. The result was a church that had learned to extract meaning from Scripture passage by passage, topic by topic, doctrine by doctrine — while the grand story those passages were embedded in faded quietly into the background.
The Enlightenment didn’t set out to undermine Scripture. It simply handed us a set of tools that were poorly suited to the kind of literature Scripture actually is. And we used those tools faithfully, generation after generation, without pausing to ask whether they were the right ones.
That is the water we have been swimming in. And you cannot diagnose what is downstream without first understanding what is upstream.
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